Paul Dresher Ensemble

Welcome to the Paul Dresher Ensemble

West Oakland Sessions | 2022 Creative Music Series

Musical Traditions and Jazz In the Neighborhood are proud to continue their partnership and present the West Oakland Sessions featuring 10 creative music concerts by adventurous Bay Area ensembles this winter and spring. The artists explore a range of improvised music traditions, from original jazz compositions to avant-garde explorations, to free jazz. These maverick bandleaders and virtuosic performers continue a long and rich Bay Area tradition in pioneering new approaches to instrumentation, notation, and musical form, by creating ever-evolving soundscapes that connect jazz with contemporary music.

Please review our Our Covid Policies and consider buying tickets for 4 or more concerts with a discounted series subscription.

Saturday, January 30, 2022, 4pm
Rent Romus — Saturday, January 30, 2022

Rent Romus – Photo: Jeremy Snowden

The Life’s Blood Ensemble “damn well rock their Jazz” says blogger disaster amnesiac while exploring the influences and inspirations that make the art of jazz and improvisation timeless. Their repertoire features original compositions and contemporary local and international composers who explore the influences and inspirations of jazz and improvisation.

Rent Romus: alto saxophone — Joshua Marshall: tenor saxophone — Heikki “Mike” Kosikinen: e-trumpet and tenor recorder — Mark Clifford: vibes — Safa Shokrai: double bass — Max Judelson: double bass — Timothy Orr: drums and percussion

Life’s Blood’s debut trio recording — recorded while Romus was on tour in Northern Europe — was released in 1999 and features Danish drummer Stefan Pasborg and bassist Jonas Westergaard. Since then he has presented the group with a variable instrumentation ranging from trio to a large fifteen-piece ensemble presenting a broad range of original performance suites. The group has featured multi-reedist Vinny Golia, world traveler and inventor Cheryl Leonard, and Finnish jazz icon Heikki “Mike” Koskinen.

  • Click here to learn more about Rent Romus

Sunday, February 20, 2022, 4pm
Ben Goldberg Trio with Liberty Ellman and Gerald Cleaver

Ben Goldberg – Photo: Gil Corre

Ben Goldberg: clarinet — Liberty Ellman: electric guitar — Gerald Cleaver: drums

Clarinetist/composer Ben Goldberg grew up in Denver. He was a pupil of the eminent clarinetist Rosario Mazzeo and studied with Steve Lacy and Joe Lovano. Since 1992, when his group New Klezmer Trio “kicked open the door for radical experiments with Ashkenazi roots music” (SF Chronicle), Ben has shaped a career through curiosity and experimentation. The New York Times says Ben’s music “conveys a feeling of joyous research into the basics of polyphony and collective improvising, the constant usefulness of musicians intuitively coming together and pulling apart.” Downbeat Magazine has twice named him Rising Star Clarinetist.

During the Covid-19 Quarantine, Ben began PLAGUE DIARY, with the goal of writing and recording a new piece every day. PLAGUE DIARY is offered free of charge on Bandcamp and now has over 200 tracks.

Ben has released over thirty records of his own compositions, ranging from further explorations of traditional Jewish music, through jazz, to the uncategorizable. The Wall Street Journal called Good Day for Cloud Fishing, his recent album featuring poems by Dean Young, “a stel­lar doc­u­ment of small-group jazz.” Ben’s groups include Invisible Guy; Tin Hat; Orphic Machine; Unfold Ordinary Mind; DIALOGUE, a duo with pianist Myra Melford; the Ben Goldberg Trio with Greg Cohen and Kenny Wollesen; Ben Goldberg School; and Ben Goldberg’s Brainchild, a large ensemble performing Ben’s on-the-spot compositions. Ben plays in Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom and is on the Music faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. He also runs BAG Production Records.

  • Click here to find out more about Ben.

Sunday, February 27, 2022, 4pm
Richard Howell and Sudden Changes

Richard Howell – Photo by John Vigran

David Frazier: percussion – Frederick Harris: piano – Elé Salif Howell: drums – Ravi Abcarian: bass – Jasim Perales: trombone – Miles Quale: violin – Richard Howell: saxophone, vocal

In many ways, Howell is a secret weapon of the Bay Area music scene, an artist who’s provided the creative glue holding together an extraordinary range of projects. Richard and his group RHQ won an Izzie Award for his collaboration with choreographer Gregory Dawson in “bird’s eye view” at the Black Choreographers Festival. He’s produced several albums by the Bay Area Afro-Brazilian ensemble Vivendo de Pão, as well as the award-winning jazz/spoken-word ensemble UpSurge! And he played an essential role as producer, arranger, and soloist on two albums by the Mo’Rockin Project, which created a singular synthesis of jazz and R&B with traditional North African modes and instruments.

Richard Howell is an acclaimed musician, composer, and educator whose music celebrates diversity as it bridges, unites, and merges the experience of all listeners. He defines it as ‘Bridge Music” — a jazz pathway over obstacles that overcomes differences and creates links through sonic connection. Its roots are based in the spirit of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” in the contradiction of James Brown’s simplistic yet complicated African-inspired rhythmic concepts, and in the deep soulfulness of the Isley Brothers forever touching our hearts. Richard has a spiritual way of connecting to audiences of all ages. appealing to multigenerational crowds, and music enthusiasts of multiple genres and cultural backgrounds.

He has performed and recorded with numerous Pop, Soul, and Jazz music icons such as Etta James, Chaka Khan, and Maurice White and the new voice of jazz, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah. He has toured the globe from America to Africa including performances at Zellerbach Hall, Royal Albert Hall and at the Newport and New Orleans Jazz Festivals.

Today he lectures Jazz History with JazzTree Education internationally, he is an intricate part of Oaktown Jazz Workshops, an active saxophonist, and educator a producer of Jazz, Funk, World and Pop music, he also leads two extremely innovative Jazz ensembles, RHQuartet and Richard Howell and Sudden Changes.

  • Click here to learn more about Richard Howell.

Sunday, March 13, 2022, 4pm
Karl Evangelista, Larry Ochs, Donald Robinson Trio

Karl Evangelista – Photo: Lenny Gonzales

Karl Evangelista: guitar – Larry Ochs: saxophone – Donald Robinson: drums

Filipino-American guitarist/composer Karl Evangelista (b.1986) ranks among a new wave of musicians pushing the traditions of jazz and experimental music into the 21st century. Synthesizing the heavy legacy of contemporary improvised music with popular song and 20th-century composition, Evangelista explores multicultural concepts with sonic intensity and political fervor.

Signal to Noise magazine hails Evangelista as “one of the most original instrumentalists and composers of his generation,” and as the creative force behind boundary-breaking group Grex, Evangelista’s music has been called an “otherworldly experience” (Eugene Weekly) and “a near-seamless blend of modern jazz, contemporary structuralist composition, indie rock, and blues-rock” (Tiny Mix Tapes).

Evangelista has explored new realms in sound and intercultural collaboration across a vast spectrum of musical situations. He has worked with or under the direction of, among others, Andrew Cyrille, Fred Frith, Eddie Gale, Oliver Lake, Myra Melford, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Zeena Parkins, Trevor Watts, Scott Amendola, Steve Berlin, Jordan Glenn, Ben Goldberg, Alexander Hawkins, Lewis Jordan, Lisa Mezzacappa, John-Carlos Perea, Gino Robair, Marcus Shelby, Aram Shelton, Damon Smith, members of ROVA, and Asian Improv aRts masters Francis Wong, Jon Jang, Hafez Modirzadeh, and Tatsu Aoki, and has performed in new arrangements of works by Moe Staiano, AACM co-founder Muhal Richard Abrams, and Art Ensemble of Chicago co-founder Roscoe Mitchell. Evangelista has presented work at the Guelph Jazz Festival, the United States of Asian America Festival, Myra Melford’s New Frequencies Festival, the Switchboard Festival, the Sonic Circuits Festival, and the Outsound New Music Summit. He has been awarded multiple Zellerbach Grants for his work in Filipino American jazz and experimental music.

  • Click here to find out more about Karl.

Sunday, March 20, 2022, 4pm
Facets with Hafez Modirzadeh, Alex Peh, and Keshav Batish

Photo courtesy of artist

Hafez Mordirzadeh: alto saxophone – Alex Peh: piano – Keshav Batish: drums

Hafez Modirzadeh’s Grammy-nominated work is global in scope, highly collaborative in nature, with a shared company extending across generations, from Ornette Coleman to Tyshawn Sorey, and Zakir Hussein to Vijay Iyer, as well as many of the original AACM members. As a Pi Recordings artist and Professor of Creative Music at SF State University, Modirzadeh’s artistic scholarship encompasses innovative concepts such as chromodality, aural archetypes, and compost music, while his most recently acclaimed “Facets” (PI 87) takes explorations in resonance on retuned piano towards “an entirely new mode of expression” (Chicago Reader), with “a feeling of rich uncertainty” (New York Times) that serves as a “blueprint for pancultural parity” (Downbeat).

Sunday, March 27, 2022, 4pm
KREation Ensemble

Photo by Vivian Lin

Kevin Robinson: woodwinds – Nayoung Jung: piano – Tony Gennaro: vibes – Jordan Glenn: drums

Kevin Robinson is a performer-composer, educator, and multi-woodwind instrumentalist who explores various interdisciplinary approaches to composition and improvisation. He is a native of Baltimore, MD, and is currently based in Oakland, CA. He has a MA in Composition Program from Mills College where he studied with Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, and others. He received his BFA in Jazz Reeds from California Institute of the Arts where he studied composition with Wadada Leo Smith and Vinny Golia.

Robinson is the leader of the band The Kevin Robinson Ensemble (KREation) which was established in 2003. The group has recorded several studio albums. He has performed at various festivals and venues throughout the United States. Some highlights include performances at the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York City, The Made in LA 2012 Biennial, The Hammer Museum in LA, Artscape Festival in Baltimore, and The Outsound Festival in San Francisco.
He has collaborated with dancers, poets, visual artists, writers, and filmmakers -including visual artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle and Warren Niedrich – filmmakers Sola Bamis and Shirley Kim. He has also performed with the Ulrich Krieger Sextet, Marilyn Crispell, Nicole Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith’s Creative Orchestra, the Vinny Golia Large Ensemble, Copper Root, Kuumba Collective, Warren Niedrich, the trio BRL, and krautrock group Faust. He was a participant at the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute (2012) at UCLA, a resident at Project Row Houses in Houston Texas (2013), and a resident at Atlantic Center for the Arts.

  • Click here to learn more about Kevin Robinson and KREation.

Sunday, April 10, 2022, 4pm
Positive Knowledge

Photo by Luciano Rosetti

Ijeoma Thomas: voice/poetry, percussion – Oluyemi Thomas: bass clarinet, saxophone – Donald Robinson: drums

As a creative musician, performer, recording artist-teacher, and engineer, Mr. Thomas seeks to express his abiding love for the hidden power of Art. Oluyemi’s primary focus is to touch the inner core of individuals, be it in a public forum, radio, television, recording, or on the bandstand. For two decades Oluyemi & his lovely wife poet Ijeoma have been members of the music and poetry unit Positive Knowledge.

Wordsmith, spoken word artist, poet, vocalist, and teacher, Ijeoma Thomas believes “all art is a gift of the Holy Spirit”. She has composed, performed, and recorded with the music unit “Positive Knowledge” and published many chapbooks and individual poems in local and national publications.

Oluyemi Thomas may be heard on Music & Arts, Ear Light Records, Eremite, Rastascan & BMG labels. The experience of his travels to Africa, the Middle East & Europe are elements he brings to his musical mix. Oluyemi’s experience in sharing musical language utterances includes the great Cecil Taylor, Wadada Leo Smith, Alan Silva, William Parker, Wilber Morris, John Tchicai, Roscoe Mitchell, and wonderful conversations with Anthony Braxton and Charles Gayle. Mr. Oluyemi believes “The musician’s art is among those arts worthy of the highest praise”… and “Music should lead to spirituality.”

Oluyemi Thomas was born in Detroit, Michigan. He studied at Washtenaw College in Ann Arbor, Michigan where he received an Associate of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering. While attending Washtenaw College, he also studied music and the spiritual and physical nature of sound & silence. In his childhood years, his mother & father often listened to the masters like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Dinah Washington, and Billie Holiday and parents’ deep love and respect for the Arts were passed on to him and his sisters and brothers.

Born and raised in Washington D.C. now based in Oakland, Ijeoma Thomas has traveled and toured in New York City, Europe, and West Africa. She has also been Artist – in – Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California. Thomas has lent a vocal poetic motif to the works of Cecil Taylor, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Miya Masaoka, William Parker, and Alan Silva.

  • Click here to find out more about Oluyemi and ljemoa Thomas.

Sunday, April 24, 2022, 4pm
House of Faern

Photo by Dyanne Cano

Beth Schenck: saxophone – Jenny Scheinman: violin – Matt Wrobel: guitar – John Wood: piano

Beth Schenck is a saxophonist, composer, and educator based in San Francisco. She feels most at home with music that blurs the line between composition and improvisation. Beth’s music has been described by critics as “frank and beautiful” (Greg Burk), “reliably enthralling” and “transporting” (Andrew Gilbert).

House of Faern is a chamber-jazz quartet unique not only for its instrumentation but also for the distinct compositional voice and an egalitarian instinct of each of its members. Separately they’ve collaborated with artists including Bill Frisell, Henry Threadgill, Lou Reed, Lucinda Williams, and the Black Keys. Founded in 2017 on the banks of the Mattole River in rural northwest California, House of Faern’s music reflects the unpredictable complexities of wild landscapes.

  • Click here to find out more about Beth Schenck

Sunday, May 5, 2022, 4pm
Erika Oba Trio

Photo by Ben Tarquin

Erika Oba: piano – Chris Bastian: bass – Jeremy Steinkoler: drums

Erika Oba is a composer, pianist/flutist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. As a composer, she has written works for big bands, small jazz ensembles, chamber groups, dance, and theater. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute, and is a member of the Montclair Women’s Big Band, Ends Meat’ Catastrophe Jazz Ensemble, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble and has performed with the Hitomi Oba Ensemble, Peter Apfelbaum’s Sparkler, and Jason Levis and Lisa Mezzacappa’s Duo B Experimental Band. In 2021, she was one of the performers in the premiere performance of Meredith Monk’s Indra’s Net.

She has worked as a dance accompanist for Mills College and Berkeley Ballet Theater and is currently a resident music director with Berkeley Playhouse’s Youth Conservatory Program. In addition to her own private teaching studio, she is a private jazz piano instructor for UC Berkeley’s Music Department.

Past artistic projects include a collaboration with choreographer Sammay Dizon, through the Red Poppy Art House’s inaugural Crossover Residency program in 2016. She was a performer fellow with Giant Steps Music Action Lab in 2017, during which she collaborated with an international group of musicians and recorded the album “What If.” In 2018, she was a composer fellow with the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music and worked with the Del String Quartet. She was the recipient of a 2019 Civics Art Grant from the City of Berkeley and collaborated with playwright Weston Scott to write an original musical. As an artist, she is interested in exploring ritual, diasporic identities, and community through performance. She received her BM in Jazz Piano Performance from Oberlin Conservatory and her MA in Music Composition from Mills College.

  • Click here to find out more about Erika Oba

Sunday, May 22, 2022, 4pm
Lisa Mezzacappa

Photo by Eric Vogler

Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco Bay Area-based composer, bassist, bandleader, and producer. Called “one of the most imaginative figures on the Bay Area creative jazz scene” by The Mercury News and “a Bay Area treasure” by KQED public radio, she has been an active part of California’s vibrant music community for nearly 20 years. Mezzacappa’s activities as a composer and bandleader include ethereal chamber music, electro-acoustic works, avant-garde jazz, music for groups from duo to large ensemble, and collaborations with film, dance, and visual art.

Recent projects include Cosmicomics, a series of compositions inspired by Italo Calvino’s stories about the origins of the universe; avantNOIR, a suite for sextet rooted in noir fiction; Organelle, a chamber suite for improvisers grounded in scientific processes on micro and cosmic scales; Glorious Ravage, an evening-length song cycle for large ensemble and films drawn from the writings of Victorian lady adventurers; and Touch Bass, a collaboration with choreographer Risa Jaroslow for three dancers and three bassists. Current projects include the duo B. Experimental Band which performs original compositions for improvisers bimonthly in Oakland, CA; and premiering over 2020-22, The Electronic Lover, a serialized podcast opera created in collaboration with writer Beth Lisick.

  • Click here to find out more about Lisa Mezzacappa

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Paul Dresher Ensemble

55 Taylor Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
Phone: (415) 558-9540